Photographing an Exploding Basketball Backboard

It’s a moment everybody wants to see, but nobody knows when it’s coming.

In March 2008, I was photographing the Premier Basketball League finals between the Rochester Razorsharks and the Arkansas Impact at Blue Cross Arena in Rochester. During the first quarter, Rochester’s Keith Friel tried to hit a three-point jumper, only to have the ball bounce off the rim. His teammates, Sammy Monroe and James “Mook” Reaves, both went up to put the ball in the hoop – both held onto the rim – and BOOM the backboard exploded. Shards of tempered glass flew all over the joint. The game was stopped for about 45 minutes while the medical staff tended to James Reaves – some of the tempered glass shards slashed his face and came dangerously close to his eyes. Rochester eventually won the game and their first PBL championship.

Would you like to see the basketball backboard go boom?

Thanks to YouTube, you can.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get the photo of the backboard exploding. Three other cameramen got the shot – I was in the wrong position on the court and it just wasn’t my time.

I cursed myself all the way home, cursing my camera and cursing my equipment and cursing like Hit Girl fighting the bad guys.

But my time would come. And one year ago, on April 19, 2009, I got my chance.

Again, the PBL finals were held at Blue Cross Arena in Rochester, as the Razorsharks hosted the Battle Creek Knights in a one-game winner take all battle. I still had my Nikon D70 camera at the time, but I had added more lenses and had learned to control my shots with more accuracy.

And sure enough, in the first quarter, Sammy Monroe stole the ball from Battle Creek’s Kenny Langhorne, and with nobody between him and two easy points, he went for a reverse dunk.

Again, here it is on YouTube.

I was under the Battle Creek basket at the time, and I had my f/2.8 80-200 telephoto lens on my D70 at the time. I aimed at Sammy Monroe, figuring I’d get a great dunk shot.

That’s Sammy going in the air.

And that’s the exploding backboard.

Again, the backboard tempered glass flew into a million pieces. Meanwhile, I was running back to my laptop computer and hoping against hope that the shot I saw on the tiny little LCD screen on the D70 was indeed an exploding backboard.

It was. I quickly uploaded it to the PBL website so that everyone could see.

Rochester won the game, defeating Battle Creek soundly for the Sharks’ second PBL championship trophy.

Of course, immediately after the game the conspiracy theorists went wild. “Oh, Rochester’s backboard broke again in the finals, what are the odds of that?” “Oh, they must have rigged or jimmied the backboard to explode, how dare they put players and fans in danger like that?”

Okay… first of all… backboards are not supposed to break. That’s a given. And they’re not supposed to break with any sort of frequency.

But Darryl Dawkins broke two backboards in the span of 30 days in the NBA, to the point where they had to re-design the backboards and rims. And in 1978, a CBA game between Anchorage and Wilkes-Barre was held up for a couple of hours when both teams’ players broke the backboards – in pre-game warmups.

So, although it is a rare occurrence, it has happened with some frequency.

Some time later, I found out why those backboards broke. They weren’t jimmied, they weren’t rigged – they were just old backboards. They had probably been in service for decades and no one ever thought that a professional basketball team would put them through such a workout; they were more often used for high school or college games.

Besides, why would anybody jimmy a backboard to explode – and endanger the lives of their players, the opposing players, and the fans in the stands? It’s crazy.

Still, it was a stroke of luck to even get those photos at the right time. And if I had pressed that shutter button just a millisecond sooner, I would have gotten the backboard in mid-break.

That’s why I have a D700 now. So that, if that day comes and I’m photographing a basketball game and it looks like someone’s going to tear the rim off the backboard and keep it as a souvenir, I’ll get that photo again.